Editing -gry puzzle (section)

==Solution techniques==
The standard way to solve such puzzles is to use a [[reverse dictionary]], or to perform an exhaustive search through a dictionary, either manually, which is tedious and error-prone, or using computer tools such as [[grep]], which requires an electronic word list. At the origin of the gry puzzle, the standard reverse dictionary in modern English was the "Air Force Reverse Dictionary" (formally the ''Normal and Reverse Word List'', compiled under the direction of A. F. Brown), which did not have additional answers for gry. The most plausible answer at the time was ''[[wikt:meagry|meagry]]'', found in the ''[[Oxford English Dictionary]]''.{{sfn|Beaman|1976|loc="A Philadelphia Story", pp. 43–44}} A more elaborate strategy is to list words that have endings similar to gry, such as ''-gary'', and then search a larger dictionary for obsolete variants ending in ''-gry'', for example ''begry'' for ''beggary''.{{sfn|Scheetz|1989|p=198–199}}

From around 1980 electronic word lists became widely available on [[Unix]] systems, and searching for answers to the gry puzzle was an occasional benchmark; this also turned up ''gryphon'' in some cases, if match is not required to be at the end.<ref name="usenix1983">{{cite conference |title=USENIX Association, Software Tools User Group, Summer Conference Proceedings |volume=2 |year=1983 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=47BQAAAAMAAJ&q=gry |page=343}} One test was to find words containing the letter sequence "gry". The "grep gry /usr/dict/words" ran significantly faster on the Concept than on the VAX (the words found were angry, hungry, and gryphon).</ref> This is now easily done in milliseconds on modern personal computers:
<syntaxhighlight lang="bash">
grep gry$ /usr/share/dict/words  # Search for words ending in gry
grep gry /usr/share/dict/words  # Search for words containing gry
</syntaxhighlight>